by Ian Irvine
CHAPTER 55
Wil’s plan had failed utterly.
After weeks of labour he had succeeded in erasing the story Lyf had written on the iron book called The Consolation of Vengeance. He had melted the book down, using trickles of heat from a perilous source near the Engine. He had even recast the heavy covers of the book, and the thirty individual cast iron leaves that made it up, and succeeded in binding them together so the pages would turn.
Now he hurled it down in disgust, for it was a lumpen travesty of the beautiful original. Wil knew true beauty when he saw it, but he was utterly incapable of creating it. And his calligraphy was worse. Though he had been practising it on the walls of the Hellish Conduit for weeks, his best attempts were hideous scrawls. He was useless at everything.
Everything save strangling Pale slaves up in Cython.
He was very good at that, very quick, when the need became unbearable and the only way to ease his own pain was to crush the throat of someone smaller than himself. Wil’s fingers, hard as the iron he had spent so much time working, closed around their slender necks and squeezed the life out of them. Though none of them was the one he wanted to squeeze. He should have done it when he was with the one, out in the Seethings. It was all her fault.
But that was not what he was here for.
He was here for the book — and the story it told. He had to rewrite the book. The story mattered more than anything. He would keep searching until he found a way.
In the meantime, Wil had something else to worry about. The Engine had developed a tiny, intermittent wobble, hardly noticeable, but it bothered him. He had tried to fix it by altering the flow of water through the myriad conduits that flowed through the Engine, but that had made it worse. It had also sent clouds of alkoyl vapour billowing up the fan cracks in the rock above, towards the Abysm.
Wil froze, staring at the cracks, his heart crashing back and forth. What if this changed the story yet again?
But then a tendril of alkoyl drifted towards him, and ah, the chymical bliss.
All his troubles went away.
CHAPTER 56
“Bitch,” said Blathy, every second time she passed Tali in the halls. Every other time she said, “Slut!”
Tali had not been to Tobry’s room again, nor had he come anywhere near hers, yet vile rumour had spread faster than the fire that had incinerated Tirnan Twil. By the time she entered the breakfast hall the following morning, everyone in Garramide save the lord himself knew that she slept with a filthy shifter. And she wasn’t taking the abuse any longer.
Tali spun around, thrusting her right arm out the way she’d done when she had killed Banj, directly up at Blathy’s throat. “What did you say?” she hissed.
“‘Slut!’ I said. What are you going to do about it?”
“I’ve got magery enough to tear your head from your shoulders,” Tali said recklessly.
“I know you have.” Blathy opened her blouse to bare her throat, and right down to her cleavage. “Go on, then.”
With her hair cascading down her back, her head tilted back and the arrogant smile that dared Tali to do it, Blathy had a barbaric grandeur that was mesmerising. She was prepared to wager her life on her assessment of Tali’s character, and take the consequences if her guess was wrong, and that made her a terrifying opponent.
One Tali could not beat. Even had the magery been at her fingertips, she could not kill Blathy in cold blood. Her threat had been empty and now her bluff had been called. She lowered her arm.
Blathy grinned savagely and turned away without a word. None were needed to reinforce her victory.
“It’s not true!” Tali cried, in a voice that rang from one end of the hall to the other. “But if it was, I’d be proud to have so brave and decent a man as Tobry Lagger as my mate.”
After that, the atmosphere wasn’t merely foul. It was poisonous.
“My chambers. Now!” said Rix, his face matching the gale raging outside.
Tali put down the potato she was peeling in the galley, washed her hands, then, avoiding all other eyes, headed upstairs.
“Did you see the lord’s face?” said a swarthy maid with an unfortunate figure. “He’s gunna give the slag what for. Put her out the door, I shouldn’t wonder. And serve the scrawny cow right.”
Tali was tempted to march back down the steps and punch the maid through the stone wall into the privies behind. She froze in mid-step, rotated on one foot to stare her down, before coming to her senses and turning away.
“She can’t get a real man,” the maid sneered. “She’ll be doing it in the pigsty next.”
As Tali whirled, a pair of steely fingers caught her elbow.
“It’s not about you,” Holm said in her ear. “Don’t make it worse.” He drew her upwards.
“I’ve been perfectly nice to them. Why do they have to be so horrible?”
He pretended to consider the question. “Apart from the fact that you’re beautiful, clever and famous?”
“I’m not famous.”
“Notorious, then. Apart from the fact that you’re on speaking terms with the chancellor, the lord of the manor, and Lyf himself, and you’ve had more adventures in a couple of months than they’ll have in ten lifetimes?”
“I wouldn’t call them adventures. More like nightmares.”
“They seem like adventures to maids who live lives of endless drudgery, and the best man they can hope for is a one-legged veteran with hair growing out of his ears. Of course they want to bring you down to their level.”
“Are you escorting me to Rix’s chambers, or making sure I don’t run away?” said Tali.
“You omitted the third possibility.”
“What’s that?”
“That I too have been summoned, like a naughty schoolboy.”
“You never do anything wrong.”
“I suspect the chancellor would have a different view on the matter.”
She managed a smile. “Oh yes.”
They reached Rix’s door. The hungry-looking guard allowed them in. “Lord Rixium will see you in a minute.”
They took seats by the fire.
A couple of minutes later, Tobry appeared. He did not appear to have slept in days. “Sorry,” he muttered, avoiding their eyes.
“You’ve got nothing to apologise for,” Tali said, more furiously than she had intended.
“Haven’t I?”
Rix kept them waiting for half an hour, then the lock clicked and he appeared behind them. For such a big man, he moved quietly.
“Well, Tali?” he said.
She could not think of anything to say. Rix had taken her in, and she had let him down.
“When you arrived,” said Rix, “my household was finally running smoothly. Morale was good and the handful of troublemakers had been contained. We’d had a notable victory, and we were united as we prepared ourselves for the greater battle to come — the battle of our lives…
“Now people are shouting abuse at each other in the halls and informing on their neighbours in the galleys and workshops, and apparently it’s down to you. Why?”
“It’s not due to Tali,” said Tobry. “I take — ”
“I’ll get to you in a minute,” Rix snarled. “And you’d better have a good explanation — though I can’t imagine what justification you can muster for such a betrayal.”
Tobry slumped back in his chair, his face in shadow.
“It may have escaped you, Tali,” Rix went on, biting each word off, “but we’re fighting a desperate battle. And you know, because I often talked about it in Palace Ricinus, that morale is vital to our survival. It wasn’t easy getting to Garramide, nor wresting it back. And the time after that, when the only thing people knew about me was the rotting carcass of House Ricinus about my neck, was dire.
“It took everything I had, and a bloody fight for our survival, to win them over. Now morale is in tatters again. Why, Tali?”
“People are spreading filthy lies about me,” Ta
li said defensively. “The whole fortress knew about me and Tobry before I left his room. Someone must have been spying on us. How else could they have known?”
“How could I have known, for that matter?” Rix said in a dangerous voice. “But wait, I didn’t know. I was deliberately kept in the dark.”
“I didn’t know myself…” Tali said feebly.
“Someone must have been spying on us,” he quoted in a whiny voice. “What do you expect when you go creeping down the stairs to Tobry’s room in the middle of the night? How could you think that someone wouldn’t try to find out what you were up to? There’s precious little privacy in a place like this, so why should you have any?”
“Don’t you believe in love?” she said stupidly.
“Bah!” he said. He turned to Tobry, regarding him for a minute or two in silence. “Why couldn’t you confide in me, Tobe?”
“I was going to tell you the moment I got here…” said Tobry.
“But?”
“I arrived in the middle of a battle, and when we fought together it was like the good old days before the war. When we sat down by the fire that night, old friends together, I couldn’t bear to ruin it.”
“Why would it have ruined it?”
“Not even you can be that dense.”
“Spell it out for me,” Rix grated.
“I thought I had, that first night.”
“Say it again.”
“Having lost everything in your previous life, you’ve taken up your Herovian heritage. The Herovians held strong beliefs about cripples, the mentally handicapped and people with ‘degenerate’ lifestyles, and I know exactly how they feel about shifters.”
“Enlighten me.”
“In the pantheon of the damned,” said Tobry, “nothing is lower or more degenerate than a shifter. Any true Herovian would have no choice but to condemn me.”
“And I’m condemned as a true Herovian, am I? Just like that.”
“Not that I don’t warrant it,” Tobry said bitterly. “I knew it would come out, and I’d be doomed when it did.” His voice dropped, almost to inaudibility. “But just for a few days, I wanted it to be like olden times.”
Rix’s face grew even colder. “I would have no choice but to condemn you, as though our longstanding friendship meant nothing? Do you truly think so little of me, that I would discard you for some petty ideology?”
“I don’t call Maloch petty. Nor the Immortal Text, nor the mural you painted up in the observatory.”
“I noticed the change within days of you coming here,” said Rix. “The day after the battle, the whole fortress was as one at dinner time. Two days after that they began to whisper in corners. I assumed it had to do with the enemy. It never occurred to me that they were talking about you.”
“Why the hell not?” said Tobry.
“You used to have friends everywhere — among the highest and among the lowest. Everyone liked you — ”
“Save the chancellor,” said Tobry. “And Lady Ricinus.”
“Their hatred counts in your favour. After your heroic deeds on the fortress wall I assumed you’d be accepted at once.”
Tobry made as if to speak, but choked it back.
“I was so busy,” Rix continued, “that it was almost a week before I realised people were wary of you. But I rationalised it. Country folk, from one of the oldest and most traditional houses in the land, were bound to take their time to accept a newcomer.”
“They could not have said what bothered them about me,” said Tobry, “but I knew — the psychic stink of the shifter. If I lived here for a thousand years they still would not accept me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“We’ve been through that.”
“For the sake of Garramide then? You could have told me, then ridden away. I would have given you half my treasury, such as it is, to help you set up — ”
“Or a bribe to keep me from coming back,” said Tobry. “A sop to your conscience?”
“Stop it!” screamed Tali. “Both of you. Tobry, how can you say such things about Rix? You know he loves you like a brother. And Rix, can’t you see what Tobry has been going through?”
“I might have, had he bothered to tell me,” said Rix. “I can’t read minds.”
“If I might interject,” said Holm, “you must have called me here for a reason.”
Rix stared at Holm as if he were a stranger. “I suppose I must, though I’m damned if I know what it is.”
“Perhaps I can enlighten you. The foregoing discussion, fascinating though it has been, hasn’t got to the real point of the problem.”
“And that is?” said Tali.
“Until this got out, the people of Garramide didn’t know why they felt so badly about Rix’s oldest friend. Now they do, and they’re angry.”
“Angry doesn’t cover it,” said Rix.
“They’re asking why you’ve allowed a foul shifter to live among them in secret. Why you would so betray them. Their beloved great dame, who was as proud a Herovian as ever lived, would not have allowed a shifter within five miles of the gates.”
“Go on,” Rix said icily.
“Some of them are wondering if you’re a true son of Lord and Lady Ricinus, whose disembowelled corpses still dangle from the traitor’s gate of Palace Ricinus. Does the dark blood of House Ricinus run in your veins? Have you come here to betray them too?”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Tali.
“It’s what a good few of the people downstairs are thinking, and some are saying.”
“Whatever you’re working up to,” Rix said between his teeth, “spit it out.”
“To put it another way,” said Holm, “your enemies are starting to contemplate the unthinkable — mutiny.”
CHAPTER 57
Mutiny was unthinkable in so traditional a house, yet if Tobry stayed here much longer, it could come to pass. And with a great battle looming, Rix could not allow any kind of unrest to divert his people from their preparations, or undermine their morale.
“What am I to do, Glynnie?” he said. They were walking a track that ran along the top of the escarpment, where he could be sure he wasn’t overheard.
“Is mutiny certain? I haven’t heard anything.”
“It’s certain that my enemies are whispering about it.”
“Who?”
“I don’t have any proof.”
“But you know who’s behind it.”
“No, but I can guess.”
“Is it imminent?”
“Not according to Swelt. Once the folk of Garramide give their loyalty, they’re not easily swayed. Though they’re angry and afraid of Tobry, it would take a lot for them to rebel. But if they’re pushed too far, they just might.”
“Be honest with them,” said Glynnie. “Call them together and explain why you took Tobry in. He’s a good man — tell them why he’s different to other shifters.”
“Is he, though — is he any different, on the inside?”
“He’s fighting it with every ounce of his will. Even I can see that.”
“But will it make any difference? I’ve never heard of anyone breaking the shifter curse, once it takes hold of them.”
Glynnie did not answer.
“Tobe and I have been through a lot together,” Rix went on. “I love him like a brother. But these people are my people now and I have a duty to them, too. How can I allow a shifter — one who could go mad any minute — to live among them?”
“What if you locked him in at night?”
“Shifters don’t only have their mad fits at night. Besides, Tobry’s a magian, a good one; I’m not sure any lock could hold him. Must I chain him to a dungeon wall? My oldest friend?”
“You could send him away. He’d understand.”
“He’s already offered to go,” said Rix. “But casting him out would feel like I’d betrayed him… and as you know, I’m a trifle sensitive about such matters.”
&nbs
p; They paced across to a mossy outcrop in silence, looped around it and headed back.
“Besides,” Rix added, “if he leaves, it’s putting the problem on someone else, because — ”
“A shifter has to feed,” said Glynnie. “Then you only have one option.”
“What’s that?”
She lowered her voice. “Identify the ringleaders and get rid of them.”
“How can I do that? They haven’t done anything yet.”
“They’re encouraging mutiny. Isn’t that enough?”
“Do you remember how the chancellor hung all the department heads of Palace Ricinus from the front gates, guilty and innocent alike?”
“Of course I remember,” said Glynnie. “He forced us to witness their deaths. I felt sure Benn… and I were going to be next.”
“That day I swore that I would treat everyone fairly and justly. I can’t arrest people and cast them out on hearsay.”
“Well, if Swelt is right, you’ve got a few days to uncover the plotters. No matter how careful they are, some of the people they try to recruit will inform on them. And then you can arrest them.”
“I hope so…” said Rix.
“The longer you leave it, the worse it’s going to get. If you’re going to be the lord of Garramide you have to take the hard decisions.”
“Swelt said the same thing.”
Rix stopped by an aged pine whose needles were like stiletto blades, and put his back to the trunk. Glynnie stood waiting several yards away, her hair streaming out in the breeze. She looked at peace, and the bruises were gone.
“How are things downstairs?” said Rix. “Between you and everyone else, I mean?”
“I fixed it.”
“How?”
“What happens downstairs stays downstairs.”
She headed towards the fortress gates. Rix watched her go. Had she fought the other servants, charmed them, or simply undermined their resentment by doing her best for everyone? He suspected that her work in the healery, where she had saved many lives, was at the heart of it. Not even Blathy took her on now.
Rix spent the day helping with repairs to the gates and the wall, trying not to analyse every sidelong glance among the workers, every low-voiced exchange. Logic said that most of the people were still behind him, that only a few troublemakers were plotting mutiny, but without proof, everyone was a suspect.